Site Mobile Navigation

Review: Eccentricity and Offbeat Humor by BalletX

Andrea Yorita, left, and Francesca Forcella performing in Trey McIntyre’s “Big Ones” at the Joyce Theater.Credit
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Ballet tends to be the most orthodox of the art forms, and often the most reactionary. How heartening to renew acquaintance with the uninhibited and adult eccentricity that BalletX, a company devoted to new choreography, seems to encourage. This Philadelphia company, appearing this week in a program of three works at the Joyce Theater, also has vividly appealing, highly individual dancers. It’s easy to miss how meticulous they are in style — but impossible not to recognize their richness and immediacy.

The first work on the program, “Show Me” (2015), is by Matthew Neenan; the third, “Big Ones” (2016), by Trey McIntyre. Much of the freshest choreography in American ballet is made by these two men. They certainly cover the country. In recent years, New York has offered lively, fresh, odd, engaging work by these two, brought by companies based in California, Idaho and Tennessee. And both have made important dances for BalletX, the smaller, younger and far more experimental of Philadelphia’s two chief ballet troupes. They also choreograph for the other one, Pennsylvania Ballet, where Mr. Neenan is resident choreographer.

Perhaps the most offbeat choreographer in American ballet, Mr. McIntyre, who often employs pop or rock music, is now in top form. When Pennsylvania Ballet visited the Joyce for a week this spring, his “The Accidental” (2014) — set to taped songs by Patrick Watson — was the program’s highlight. Now his “Big Ones” (whose premiere I reviewed in Philadelphia this February), accompanied by Amy Winehouse recordings, proves marvelous. This year has already brought some excellent fresh choreography; “Big Ones,” as well as Alexei Ratmansky’s very dissimilar “Serenade After Plato’s Symposium,” new with American Ballet Theater this May, are two of the best examples.

Photo

Gary W. Jeter II and Skyler Lubin with fellow members of BalletX in Matthew Neenan’s “Show Me,” at the Joyce Theater.Credit
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

“Big Ones” is truly weird, but it takes you inside its weirdness so soon and so surely that it shows many different humors: It’s funny, touching, poignant, stirring. At its premiere in February, the audience members didn’t laugh; they do now, and at the end they give it the evening’s biggest ovation. The principal peculiarity is derived from the costumes, designed by the ubiquitous team Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, also here at their finest and most idiosyncratic. The dancers, wearing tunics and dark brown leather hot pants, then tie on bonnets with two-foot-tall vertical ears, antennae, tufts or horns.

Most of the performers retain these throughout, but for two of them, removing the headgear becomes dramatically significant, so that it’s easy to assume that these bizarre hats are symbols — and to ask what they symbolize. The absurdity of conventionality? When Chloe Felesina, the protagonist here, removes hers, we’re so used to seeing everyone wearing these high-rise headpieces that her act becomes one of courage and self-assertiveness. When she removes Daniel Mayo’s — we’ve watched him become her boyfriend — it’s traumatic; he’s vulnerable, exposed.

It’s better, though, not to explain meanings here. There’s a multiplicity. Several ideas certainly arrive from the Winehouse songs, with her chesty voice planting their words so firmly into our ears: This is a ballet that starts (irresistibly) with the words, “They tried to make me go to rehab/I said no, no, no.” The world onstage is marvelously, darkly realized by Drew Billiau’s lighting; we’re in some club. The bonnets all start out on a row of stands at the back, and the crazy conformism of the piece is established by the unquestioning way the dancers, as they enter, don the headgear as a matter of course.

Drama here derives principally from the dances, which are as odd as the costumes. It’s hard to believe now that nobody at the February premiere laughed out loud when Zachary Kapeluck, the tallest and biggest man onstage, threw up his heels in a fast little knock-kneed Charleston step; the Joyce audience chuckled happily at the sight. The men and women here are absurd, silly, often adorable, but not really impressive. Ms. Felesina — both tough and lonely — at first seems damaged in the way that she cannot quite connect with any of them, but the duet in which she and Mr. Mayo find intimacy is the piece’s biggest, sweetest surprise.

Photo

BalletX performing “Gran Partita” at the Joyce Theater.Credit
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Mr. Neenan’s “Show Me,” new at the 2015 Vail International Dance Festival, was performed this February in a revised, expanded form. It has now acquired more moment-by-moment immediacy, has been abbreviated (nearer to the Vail original), and nicely establishes the striking individuality of these dancers at the evening’s outset. Its main structural units are two quartets — three men and a woman, three women and a man — from which all kinds of nice ideas about gender and drama start to arise; when another man and a woman enter, the structure changes and changes again.

This is characteristic 21st-century ballet choreography. Sexuality is not the premise, but, when couples do form, some of them happen to be same-sex.

Mr. Neenan was one of BalletX’s two founders 11 years ago. As a choreographer, he has, admirably, several different styles and many compositional formats; “Show Me” is never dull. Though it’s not among his strongly individual pieces, it proves a happy, quirky introduction to the program.

The centerpiece, Jorma Elo’s “Gran Partita” (2014), is marvelously danced. Though the choreography seems at first to be another example of BalletX eccentricity, it abounds in clichés and draws attention to its own deliberate unmusicality. Using taped music by Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart and Bach, it sets big, showy movements and emphatic dynamics where the music is subtle and often gentle. But Mr. Elo, who in other ballets has often made his dancers look bad, here allows BalletX’s precise rigor and fullness of tone to emerge. This is a company whose skills continually deepen and mature.